Reports had circulated last year, when Microsoft unveiled its AI-powered Bing, about a code red crisis in Google's headquarters. Ever with the introduction of ChatGPT and the ensuing surge in interest in AI, the two tech behemoths have been engaged in a fierce competition. In an interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed the company's desire to see Google "dance" in the fight against artificial intelligence. New claims, however, indicate that Microsoft was also having sleepless nights due to Google's AI breakthrough in this developing field. It chose to significantly invest in ChatGPT parent company OpenAI as a result.

Microsoft saw that Google was making rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI), as seen by the improvement of Gmail's auto-complete feature, according to a Business Insider story.

In 2019, Bill Gates and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, received an email from Kevin Scott, the company's chief technology officer. Scott seemed "very worried" in the email, according to the Business Insider article, since he believed Microsoft was far behind Google in artificial intelligence (AI) research.

He stated that Microsoft has a great deal of catching up to accomplish.

The email was sent to Amy Hood, the chief financial officer, by CEO Satya Nadella. The email, he claimed, demonstrated the need for OpenAI investment. Because of a legal action the US government is taking against Google, alleging that the company has too much power over the search industry, the email was just made public.

“It turns out that we had difficulty even reproducing BERT-large. Despite having the model's template, it took us around six months to train the model due to inadequate infrastructure. Prior to that, Google had possessed BERT for at least six months. Therefore, in the year it took us to figure out how to train a 340M parameter model, Google had a year to figure out how to put it into production and move on to more intriguing, larger-scale models. The fruits of such labor are already evident in our examination of their goods' competitive landscape. Because to BERT-like models, one of the Q&A competitive measures we track on Google Search suddenly increased by 10%. A portion of the email stated, "Their auto-complete in Gmail, which is especially helpful in the mobile app, is getting frighteningly good."

Since Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the collaboration has expanded significantly. Since then, the internet behemoth has poured billions of dollars into Sam Altman's business. Investing in OpenAI by Microsoft proved to be a prudent choice. Both the general public and investors have shown a great deal of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT initiative. Some speculated that Google could be lagging behind Microsoft because of the latter's rapid rollout of new AI features in its products.

Last year, during a legal questioning session, Nadella clarified that their investment in OpenAI was for more than just enhancing Microsoft's search engine. Nonetheless, this investment has resulted in a notable advancement in their search technology.